The city of Bellevue strengthened its IT infrastructure and invested in storage consolidation and server virtualization technologies that could deliver content-rich services to its citizens.

The Solution

My team worked with Integrated
Archive Systems (IAS) on streamlining
our storage infrastructure to improve performance, simplify
management, increase efficiencies and enable easy scalability. For the
green
data center operations, we consolidated
direct-attached storage, network-attached
storage
and storage area network on a NetApp unified
storage architecture. We
leveraged VMware to virtualize and consolidate 70 percent
of our approximately 200 servers,
and we plan to hit our 80
percent
virtualization goal this year.

Consolidating storage with
virtualization enables IT to quickly deliver customer services with faster and
easier provisioning. The consolidated infrastructure has set us up nicely for
appropriate disaster recovery plans, private cloud for secure multitenancy and
isolation, and virtual desktops.

It is also very easy for our
administrators to use and quickly respond to storage needs. Above all, we
now have a flexible, expandable and manageable system that enables the
point-in-time recovery that our customers need, along with
the ability to deliver services via a private cloud that lets us segment
services without spawning new infrastructure.

Additionally, as a result of our storage
consolidation and virtualization strategy, we have unified our previously
disparate storage silos into a shared, centrally managed resource for long-term
planning, trending and capacity management. We gained outstanding performance,
scalability and efficiency, resulting in better services to our customers—the
city departments that serve our growing population.

Our new unified storage achieved 30 to 40 percent
storage space savings with NetApp deduplication out of the box, allowing us to
avoid buying more storage for the past couple of years—a
big help for our constrained budget. Another key benefit is that our IT
department has reduced recovery point objectives (RPOs)
from 24 hours to one or two hours for critical
applications, while reducing
administration time by 30 percent. This enabled
our IT staff to focus on other job
responsibilities.

All the benefits our IT department
has gained ultimately connect back to the city’s continued commitment to
environmental stewardship and reducing our carbon footprint. We were able to
minimize the environmental impact of the city’s IT operations by decreasing
material use and energy consumption that helps support
our Energy Star building certification for City Hall.

As part of this commitment,
Bellevue IT and its facilities
organization installed outside air cooling for our data
centers,
set higher data center temperatures and installed
more-accurate
power meters to better measure and assess trends
in
our energy consumption. We improved our power-usage
effectiveness (PUE) from
1.6 in 2007 to 1.5 in 2011. We also facilitated teleworking by
enabling remote access to our applications and data, instituted double-sided
printing as the default (delivering a 17
percent reduction in paper
use) and extended equipment life
cycles:
PC
life was extended from three
years to four, and server life was extended
from four years to five.

The partnerships with our
core vendors—Citrix, Microsoft, NetApp
and
VMware—were instrumental in achieving our
solutions. The vendors responded to our business
needs and provided sophisticated
products to achieve cohesive, seamless solutions. They also brought
ideas from their other customers that would work in
our environment and helped us keep up with industry best practices.

These projects have had an impact
on the
employees
and citizens of the city
of Bellevue. We will continue to build on our environmental achievements with
more projects for submitting plans online, mobile apps for field
staff, environmental portals for businesses and citizens, and unified
communications for all staff members. With these projects, we hope to
increase productivity, while reducing paper use, vehicle
miles traveled and greenhouse gas emissions.

As a growing, thriving metropolis
with limited resources, the city
of Bellevue constantly strives to do more with less and make the
most of our IT investments. By using our normal replacement cycle to overhaul
our IT infrastructure, we are better positioned to meet expanding business
demands amid the challenge of budget reductions.

And, by
implementing an efficient IT infrastructure, Bellevue has become more
resource-efficient and is saving money without compromising
customer service, security or resiliency.